Humans aren't machines.

Artists aren't art factories.

Parents aren't child rearing robots.

But often we bow to the pressure of a society that seems to think we should be.

Do more, be more, get better, fit more in, set some goals, achieve them, set some more… now do the thought experiment - can you hit your ten year goals in six months? Do you feel as tired reading this as I do writing it? We're not ingenious contraptions meant for perpetual expansion.

Have you spent much (or any, come to that) time thinking about doors?

A door is a threshold between two places, but most of us don't really notice them, much of the time.

Think about it, though. Doors are pretty amazing things. They can connect two worlds that are wildly different. They're the point, travelled through, that takes us from somewhere to somewhere else.

I could do anything; so why am I doing this?

It's a question I come back to every now and then - usually it hits me like a bolt from the blue when I'm doing something mundane or enduring my way through something I think I "should" be doing, when life has been feeling a bit samey for a while.

It's a reminder that this is my one wild and precious life… and there is so much to be in awe of, and yet I am not all that often in a state of awe. Why is that? I could be doing anything, so why am I doing this?

I've said to a lot of people that this is the fastest year I've ever lived. And that I'm trying to find a time elf who can help me slow it down because it's getting ridiculous. I wake up in the morning and five minutes later it's night again and the days feel like strobe lights.

I still have not found a time elf (though I think I'm getting closer).

But I have found a little bubble of no-time. It's kind of like a weird liminal time-outside-time that feels kind of like a sigh.

Creative self care is the best self care. I talk about it being good for stress relief and finding flow, but it occurred to me that those are very 'proper' (and maybe slightly boring) reasons. It's also good for much weirder and more whimsical stuff. Here's a bunch of weird reasons that I've been hoarding like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold.

I had plans yesterday to write some things about the inner critic, and how it gets a bad rap because often when we're thinking of our inner critics, we're thinking of an unhealthy version that's mean or vicious or thinks that shaming us is useful. The one that tells us we're bad or wrong and nothing we create is worthwhile or will ever be good enough. But, this isn't all an inner critic can be. There is such a thing as a healthy inner critic, who can grow to be one of our greatest supports.

And I will write more about that next week.

Because yesterday had other plans for me, and it was necessary instead to take a moment of grace.

We are made of stories. Who we think we are, our histories that have led us to come to know ourselves. The values that we live by. It's all stories.

I'm creative. I'm a victim of this circumstance or that one. I'm someone who hates the cold.

Because I hold these stories about myself, they influence my actions in various ways.

Because I tell the story of hating the cold, I live in the tropics and refuse to go south in the winter.

What if I tried on the story of being an Antarctic explorer? Perhaps I'd buy some warmer clothes and go south for the winter, treat it like an expedition into the unknown… it'd be a very different experience of life from my current one.

I read a question somewhere a while ago that I liked.

Instead of striving to be your 'best self' or trying to figure out what your 'higher self' would do, instead, ask:

Who is your most favourite self?

The version of you that you like being the best.

What if you were a landscape?

A place, deep and wide, full of weather and tides?

How would it feel?

What does safety feel like to you?

For some people, the answer is 'I don't know'. Particularly for people living with a lot of trauma, or for those under a lot of stress or going through challenging times. The idea of feeling safe seems a bit abstract and unknowable in a real world sense.

Sometimes it's hard to know what safe feels like in our increasingly complex and fast paced world.

One way to begin to find a sense of safety is by starting with your imagination…

Don't know about you, but for me, one of the symptoms of being stuck in a life rut is a co-dependent relationship with my never-ending to-do list - I can't possibly go anywhere or do anything different or interesting because look at this list, it needs me.

The inside of a rut feels like it's coated in glue. It's sticky and gets on everything and makes it really hard to climb out. Or maybe it's like wearing a velcro suit - less messy than glue but the effect is the same.

I love the sound of humming bees. For a while, I lived in a house with a flowering citrus in the yard. Not quite an orange, not quite a grapefruit. When it flowered, all the bees would come. At those times, I called it the humming tree. I would go sit under it and listen. I'd hum back to the bees and I think the bees liked that. After a while, it made me feel like the hum was under my skin, like I was made of hum, and the humming felt like happiness.

There's a reason why humming feels like happiness.

Social media is an attention stealing beast, feeding us aspirational content with the undertone of "this could be you", and its evil cousin, "this SHOULD be you". And part of us agrees - you're right, that should be me. And then we feel inadequate, and hopeful or despairing we feed the beast more of our attention, click on links and buy more things to make our lives as easy and perfect as the lives we see on our screens.

And it still doesn't work. The beast keeps showing us more parts of our lives that aren't yet shiny enough, and we still feel lost and broken, and so we stay on the hamster wheel and keep scrolling, thinking everyone else has got it together - what's wrong with me that I don't?

I'll tell you what's wrong with you - nothing.

Today, on the longest day of the year, I'm thinking about grace.

The world is a lot right now (perhaps it always is, in some regard).

The holidays are coming and they can be a complicated time. And then there's that weird limbo between Christmas and the new year. Another year starting - reflecting on the year that was, holding so much hope for the year to come.

And so here I am, thinking about grace.

You know the kind of scrolling where you're so checked out you're outside time and you aren't even really seeing what you're looking at? Who knows how long I'd been doing that for when I came across a sponsored post that snapped me back into time again.

And then something magic happened…

It’s an easy trap to fall into, given the culture we live in, to believe that parts of ourselves aren’t right. To find ourselves thinking that it’s not okay to be needy, to think that we need to kill off our people pleasers, exorcise our anxiety, stop being a victim and claim our empowerment. To beat ourselves up for finding it hard to take off the suit of armour and be more open, more soft, more vulnerable.

It’s like we’re trying to chop ourselves into pieces and only keep the good bits.

But that’s not how healing works. That’s not how growth works. That’s not how we get what we want.

Imagination is sometimes dismissed as childish or frivolous (it’s ‘just’ your imagination), but it’s one of the most powerful tools we have. Before we can create anything, we have to imagine it, from something as simple as a sandwich to something as complex as a skyscraper.

Everything we create is born from our imagination. Imagination is what shapes our world - the stories we tell about ourselves and our place in the world, the meaning we make from the things we experience - imagination is the glue that holds us together.

What if you were a tree?

Humans are creatures made of stories - it’s how we make sense of the world and of ourselves. We use all kinds of metaphors to communicate our experiences. I slept like a log. I’m feeling kind of batty. They’re keeping on the straight and narrow. It’s raining cats and dogs.

Art therapy is a great way to explore, understand and change our metaphors and stories. Read on for more…

There’s something delightful about stepping outside of routine and doing things differently. Interrupting our regular patterns with something interesting or beautiful or curious or nurturing.

It’s also sometimes quite hard to do, given that it’s easy to get into ruts and routines, and the point of a rut or a routine is that you don’t have to think about it. And if you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, it’s hard to make a choice to do things a different way.

Which is why it can be nice to enlist support to interrupt our patterns.

Please bring strange things…

This poem by Ursula K. Le Guin always moves me. Perhaps it will move you, too.